About
The Structure and Dynamics eJournal welcomes articles, book reviews, data, simulations, research material, and special issues that examine aspects of human evolution, social structure and behavior, culture, cognition, or related topics. Our goal is to advance the historic mission of anthropology in the broadest sense to describe and explain the range of variation in human biology, society, culture and civilization across time and space. Submissions of databases, software tutorials, programs, and teaching materials are welcomed, as are communications on research materials of interest to a wide variety of science and social science researchers, including networks, dynamical models, and complexity research and related genre.
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2014
Articles
COMBINING DIVERSE DATA SOURCES FOR CEDSS, AN AGENT-BASED MODEL OF DOMESTIC ENERGY DEMAND
CEDSS (Community Energy Demand Social Simulator) is an empirical agent-based model designed and built as part of a multi-method social science project investigating the determinants of domestic energy demand. Ideally, empirical modellers, within and beyond social simulation, would prefer to work from an integrated dataset, gathered for the purposes of developing the model. In practice, many have to work with less than ideal data, often including processed data from multiple sources external to the project. Moreover, what data will be required may not be clear at the start of the project. This paper describes the approach to dealing with these factors taken in developing CEDSS, and presents the completed model together with an outline of the calibration and validation procedure used. The discussion section draws together the most distinctive features of empirical data collection, processing and use for and in CEDSS, and argues that the approach taken is sufficiently robust to underpin the model’s purpose – to generate scenarios of domestic energy demand to 2049.
- 1 supplemental ZIP
On the emergence of large-scale human social integration and its antecedents in primates
One of the universal features of human sociality is the fact that our social networks are highly integrated – human societies exhibit several nested social layers including families, bands and communities. Several factors have been identified as creating disincentives for hostile intergroup relations, including economic interdependence (trade), intermarriage (exogamy), cooperative defence against external adversaries (warfare), and lack of patrilocal residential groups (absence of patrilocality with external war). We provide a preliminary test of hypotheses relating to the correlates of amicable relations between communities (i.e. absence of internal war) using the standard cross-cultural sample (SCCS) database. Intermarriage did not have any explanatory power, there is a nearly significant effect of trade on the establishment of intergroup tolerance, and the evidential basis for cooperative defence and patrilocal residence are strong when combed into a multiplicative effect. This analysis is complemented with an exploration of the evolutionary factors underlying elementary forms of meta-group organization in non-human primates.